It’s happening to the Navy hospital ship Mercy, based in San Diego, which on Thursday will be recognized for a string of humanitarian missions to Southeast Asia.

The ship is being honored with the National Peacemaker Award, handed out annually by the San Diego-based National Conflict Resolution Center. This is the award’s 25th year. Past winners include anti-apartheid playwright Athol Fugard, political analyst and Harvard public service professor David Gergen, and the International Rescue Committee.

“One of the interesting things to us with the Mercy is when they go into these different places, they take the time to collaborate with the host countries,” said Blair Blum, a resolution center board member. “They take the time to really learn about the culture and the people, which helps to expand peace and civility around the world.”

Last year, the ship spent four months in Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Its doctors and nurses saw almost 50,000 patients and performed almost 1,000 surgeries. Veterinarians treated 7,000 animals. Engineers built or refurbished 13 school and health-care buildings.

But those are just numbers. To Capt. Tim Hinman, the ship’s commanding officer, the multinational exercise known as the Pacific Partnership was also about changing lives. And maybe minds.

When the Mercy made its first humanitarian voyage, to Indonesia and Bangladesh in January 2005, it didn’t just provide relief to those ravaged by the massive tsunami that hit the area a few weeks earlier. It also helped revive America’s image in those Muslim countries, an image battered by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

A year later, after a return trip by the Mercy, a Washington D.C. non-profit group, Terror Free Tomorrow, polled residents in Indonesia and Bangladesh and found that 95 percent approved of the humanitarian efforts. Most respondents also said they now viewed the United States more favorably.

“We’re not just doing good things and leaving,” Hinman said. “We’re building relationships that can be relied upon later on.”

Uncertain future

This is an awkward time for the Mercy to be getting an award.

Sequestration and the ongoing budget battles in Washington D.C. have put question marks around all sorts of government programs, inside the military and out. Can the country afford the $20 million it costs to send the Mercy to Southeast Asia?

Can it afford not to?

That’s a lot of money to most people, but it’s not much when compared with the cost of war. In 2006, the Defense Department estimated it was spending $100,000 per minute fighting in Iraq. At that rate, it would take about three hours to match the money spent on an aid mission.

This isn’t the first time the Mercy and its Virginia-based sister ship, the Comfort, have faced an uncertain financial future.